I Yelled at Him Last Night

If you have been following our Instagram photos (@franklin_street_globetrotters), you know that we have been in total awe and inspiration of Belize, and particularly the people here in Hopkins, Village, but if you have been reading my blog posts, you also know that I have been struggling with sleep (due to mice, bugs, thunderstorms, and roosters).

Keep in mind that we are in low season so there are very few tourists around, though there is still an ex-Pat German contingent here in Hopkins. As you may gather, Kapil and I don’t partake in the nightlife scene out here and are usually fast asleep around 10pm, but we understand that there is usually a “party” that rotates at one bar or another. Well, last night, the party moved to the bar/restaurant next door and I fell asleep to beats, laughter, and drunk voices.

It just so happens that our vocal rooster neighbor lives at this bar and I think the partying confused the rooster’s timings. As it is, the Belizean roosters (or at least the ones in Hopkins) do not follow common rooster protocol in timings or sound. Instead they start sounding off around 1:30/2am and go on in regular intervals until sunrise. They sound rain or shine, thunderstorms or silence. They also don’t sound like “cock-a-doodle-do” but rather “cock-a-doo--dehhhhh-daaaaaaahhhhhh” (male voice that is going hoarse and trying to recover into a goat sound after a high-pitched intro). My thunderstorm video in the “What the Heck Have We Done” journal entry has a brief rooster sound at the end for reference.

Anyway, at about 12:45am, I heard a drunken man copy the rooster sound across the Hopkins village. He made the sounds five-six times in a row in repeated succession. I was so annoyed. This drunken tourist was going to wake up all of Hopkins and give us tourists a bad name. I “shhhh’d” out of our bedroom rafters which overlook the bar but to no avail.

At 1:15am the same cycle repeated, and I yelled, “Hey, please stop! You are waking up the village” at the top of my lungs—but again to no avail. Then at 1:45am I had enough. I yelled again and also this time woke up my entire family. Kapil then asked if I was ok or rather, “Aila, what’s wrong with you?”

“What do you mean? This idiot thinks that copying the rooster is funny. Can you say something?”

Kapil paused and then said, “Babe, that is not a person, it is a rooster.”

The rooster was pretending to be a drunk human? I was shocked…sleep deprivation is catching up to me.